Old blog still hidden in here:
Doesn't work:
OK, with that glitch that people were getting on Radeon cards, I did a bit of digging and found that certain Radeons cause trouble with a variety of games at certain resolutions.
I still want to try to patch the game, but for now, I
might have a solution:
Try setting your desktop resolution down a couple of notches, then try running the game.If that still doesn't work, you'll have to wait for a proper patch.
Sorry about short-blog. I'll tack some more content on later, perhaps?
I'll work on a patch tonight, and I'll link it on my blog as an optional content download. :P
Anyway, I spent a pleasant afternoon watching the equipment for my new job being set up. Tomorrow, I'll be shown how it works and how to use it.
I'll be working at selling water, and filtering it with a massive reverse osmosis filter machine and ozone generator. Woot.
The back of the shop looks like a laboratory, seriously… Good thing we're hiding it all behind a drywall section…
All I need now is a lab coat >:3
Anyway, I have some potential things to look at regarding the Exile glitch. And if any of you 3D programmers have any tips, feel free to shoot 'em.
New content:OK, I created the first patch for a game I've made. Ever.
This is either a good thing, meaning that a game I've made warrants a patch, or it means I'm going the path of EA and using bugs as an unintended copy-protection technology by requiring the user to download a patch in order to play the game they forked over their hard earned money for.
Exile - Patch 1.1DownloadJust extract the contents of that ZIP into the Exile directory, overwriting Exile.exe.
CHANGELOG 1.1:
> Fixed occlusion bugs. No more disappearing blocks, even though
they really made my day when people came up with witty reasons
for their existence.
> –HOPEFULLY– fixed the Radeon stretched sprite glitch.
I can't verify this, but I've tried every trick in the books that
I could find. Please return some feedback on this one.
> Hacked/patched the XP glitch.
> Gave the player a +1 bonus to starting ATKSPEED to make the game
slightly easier on some players. This will be factored into a
difficulty setting at some point.
> No new content added.
I'll miss the occlusion bugs… Cesque had me in stitches at the whole 'curse' thing… And so did charliecarlo for that matter, what with the world disappearing, just a bit to your left… Maybe I laugh to easily…
Anyway, no content was added, so if the game isn't bugging you, don't bother downloading the patch.
To the people experiencing the stretched-billboard problem: I
think I
might have fixed that. I tried a couple of things:
> Using Triangle-strips instead of quads. Apparently some ATI cards dislike GL_QUADS.
> Changing the precision of the vertices fed into the geometry pipeline
from float to double. Might be that the values dealt with are too
close to zero for the GPU's liking, so forcing it to use fp64 might
help things along. Might…
> Head-banging the keyboard.
> Playing final-boss music while glaring at the code. Malevolently. >:3
> Threw a rock in a sock at the screen. It cracked…
OK. Really couldn't think of much else to do. This is one of those infuriating situations that remind me so much of the old DOS game development days where hardware specific workarounds became necessary for… well… anything.
Future plansNow that I've finally finished (To some degree) the game I always wanted to make, I intend to take it a couple of steps further.
I'm open to suggestions, for story, art, programming, music, or whatever. Eventually I hope to release this as a full four-episode epic. Maybe with some good ol' online headbashing.
One thing I intend to do is implement a BSP-like level format; of course, I label this as a long-term project, as I'm going to need a new level editor first. No, I refuse to use the existing Quake tools. I want to learn about the format myself, and then create an editor that does what I want out of the box, and can support new features…
One awesome addition I'm going to factor in to my next build of the code, after I've seen the results of the patch on other people's machines, is the addition of integrated AngelScript.
For those of you who don't know, it's a C/C++/Java inspired scripting language that can either JIT compile scripts, or use precompiled scripts somewhat similarly to UnrealC/QuakeC. I'll probably end up implementing interfaces to the different object types (The Map, Player, Enemies, Pickups, Projectiles, Menus, etc), thus removing a lot of potential bugs from the core engine.
This also means that I'll have an independant 3D engine to
abuse at will… Something I wanted to make since I was much younger and had just discovered the Build engine.
Anyway, I'm going to get to work filling in the remaining documentation for the game as it stands, backing it up before rewriting 20% of the code, and probably replacing my MPK system with PhysFS. Who knows. Lots of fun ahead :3
Well, I'll sign off for now. I've got a busy week ahead of me. I can soon see myself
really looking forward to my little frags of programming time…
What are the dimensions of the textures of the enemies? Remember, whenever the texture dimensions aren't powers of 2, straaange things can happen. A wild guess is that the animated textures are the odd ones out… I assume that you use a strip for those? Well the dimensions of those strips need to be powers of 2 as well.
Oh… DAMN. Why did I forget that? I'll try that.
My computer may be outdated, but if I'm having poor FPS with square blocks and billboard sprites, that's closer to a design flaw. Didn't see the exact framerate, but all I can tell you is that I only got one attack in every ten seconds. What do you have in there that's causing such slowdown and don't you have the option to use frameskip instead?
Have to say though, the music was different than what I'd normally expect from you. Catchy, too.Fucking good memory. But I was talking about my laptop, which is the computer I have most access to. I can play most games at moderate framerate at least, but this was unbearably slow for some reason.
I know the first 128 decimal digits of pi, so remembering what video cards random people have isn't much of a stretch as far as knowing semi-useless information goes.